While Apple CEO Steve Jobs said on Wednesday that iOS 4.1 would be coming to iPhones and iPod touches this coming week, he didn’t give a date. It seems the Apple U.K. site’s webmaster has put up some different info that in the U.S., with their site giving an exact date: Sept. 8.

The U.S. site continues to say “Coming Soon,” but we’ll assume that rather than making two mistakes (posting a date, and posting a wrong date) that the Sept. 8 is correct. It also makes sense since the new iPod touches will ship on Sept. 8, with iOS 4.1 pre-installed.

Full Story: Hot Hardware

Two weeks ago, Adobe promised to fix the Black Hat vulnerability with an emergency, or “out-of-band” security update; earlier this week it set today as the release date.

That vulnerability was disclosed by researcher Charlie Miller at July’s Black Hat event in Las Vegas, where he demonstrated how the open-source BitBlaze toolkit could boost bug-hunting productivity. Miller, an analyst with Baltimore-based Independent Security Evaluators and a well-known vulnerability researcher, said the bug was in Reader’s and Acrobat’s font parsing.

Full Story: Network World

Apple released an update to its Safari web browser Wednesday.

Safari 5.0.1 is available from Apple as a free download for Windows and for Mac OS X (Leopard or better). Mac users can also find it in Software Update.

This is an incremental upgrade, but it comes with one big new feature: Safari now has a real platform for third-party extensions, a feature that Firefox and Chrome have had for some time.

Safari 5 arrived in early June, and in addition to dozens of other enhancements (including the much-discussed Reader feature) it included a new architecture for creating lightweight browser extensions that enhance and personalize web pages and web services. Wednesday’s update now lets you install and run those extensions. Apple has also launched a new Extensions Gallery where you can browse the available extensions and download them.

Full Story: Wired

Apple’s iOS 4.0.1 has arrived — along with 3.2.1 for iPads — and the big buzz is about a change in the way “bars” of signal strength are displayed. iOS 4.0.1 “Improves the formula to determine how many bars of signal strength to display,” but the 378MB update doesn’t have any other specific info in the release notes.

Apart from changing how many bars to show, Apple has also messed with the size of the bars. Engadget did a comparison of the old and new versions, but one of the screenshots was from the Home Screen, and one was from an app, so it was a little tricky to see the difference. Here’s what each meter looks like at full bars on my iPhone 3GS:

Full Story: Download Squad

As we’ve mentioned before, SP1 includes RemoteFX, which allows for host-based rendering of 3D graphics. That means when you remotely connect to another computer, you get the same multimedia experience (including Silverlight video, Aero effects, and 3D applications) as you would on your local desktop.

Full Story: Download Squad

Apple has issued an update to its MobileMe iDisk application today and version 1.2 brings some welcome improvements. As well as support for multitasking and fast app switching, iDisk is now a universal application and works natively on the iPad.

What’s more, iPad users can now export documents from iDisk in to iBooks or office applications like Apple’s own Pages, Numbers & Keynote offerings.

Another big improvement is the ability to listen to music from within the iDisk application – this means you can save space on your device by uploading your tracks to an iDisk folder and then listening to them from there. Obviously this will require a data connection to your iDisk, however.

Full Story: Cult of Mac

The iPhone 4 has been the most successful product launch in Apple’s history. It has been judged by reviewers around the world to be the best smartphone ever, and users have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned.

To start with, gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars. This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones. But some users have reported that iPhone 4 can drop 4 or 5 bars when tightly held in a way which covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band. This is a far bigger drop than normal, and as a result some have accused the iPhone 4 of having a faulty antenna design.

At the same time, we continue to read articles and receive hundreds of emails from users saying that iPhone 4 reception is better than the iPhone 3GS. They are delighted. This matches our own experience and testing. What can explain all of this?

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.

We will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.

We have gone back to our labs and retested everything, and the results are the same— the iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped. For the vast majority of users who have not been troubled by this issue, this software update will only make your bars more accurate. For those who have had concerns, we apologize for any anxiety we may have caused.

As a reminder, if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged iPhone to any Apple Retail Store or the online Apple Store within 30 days of purchase for a full refund.

We hope you love the iPhone 4 as much as we do.

Thank you for your patience and support.

Apple

Press Contacts:
Natalie Harrison
Apple
harri@apple.com
(408) 862-0565
Steve Dowling
Apple
dowling@apple.com
(408) 974-1896

Source: Apple

With yesterday’s major update to iOS comes a major new source of revenue for both Cupertino and app developers: iAd, Apple’s new mobile advertising service.

In a best case scenario, iAd will result in cheaper apps that deliver interesting, interactive advertisements finely targeted enough that you’ll actually want to play around in them. The worst case? Invasive, privacy-invading ads spreading across all ads that are just as annoying and irrelevant as the braying flash banners splashed across a Yugoslavian torrent site… just with no way to install AdBlock.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to get rid of iAd on your device… at least until the jailbreaker community comes up with their own iAdBlock. That said, you can easily prevent Apple from using your personal details to serve you up user-targeted iAds. Just click this link on your iOS 4 capable device, and Apple will no longer use your personal information to serve you up user-targeted ads.

Full Story: Cult of Mac

When Apple released OS X 10.6.4 last week, the company said it addressed certain compatibility issues with VPN connections and other things, but failed to mention anything about adding an anti-malware update.

But buried in the code is an update to the XProtect.plist file, which contains signatures of malware written to target the Mac. The signatures now detect malware dubbed “HellRTS”, Graham Clulely of Sophos wrote in a blog post.

HellRTS, which Sophos detects as “OSX/Pinheard-B”, is a Trojan that has been around several months. It lets attackers use infected computers to send spam, take screenshots, access files, and pretty much take control of the computer, Sophos said.

Full Story: ZDNet Asia

A critical bug in the Help and Support center was made public recently and Microsoft has neither a fix nor an estimate as to when a fix might be available. Worse still, sample code to exploit the bug is readily available, along with a detailed explanation of the flaw, making it especially easy for bad guys to exploit the vulnerability.

The problem has to do with the way HCP:// links are processed. Normal website links, of course, use HTTP, HCP links are used by the Help and Support Center (helpctr.exe).

Full Story: PC World